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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019May 9, 2025 2077

I came across this today and broke up laughing. These are seriously clever! Thanks to the Washington Post. I wasn’t aware of their neologism contest, but I am now! Read and enjoy. Pass it along.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.

Romulus Linney

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

Don’t annoy an author, you’ll end up in their book and you won’t look good.

Lawrence Wray

In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Will Rogers

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.

Quentin Tarantino

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”